Goals

Justice in Schools has six goals:

Help educators develop an “ethical repertoire” that helps them identify and respond to dilemmas of justice, just as they have a pedagogical repertoire that helps them respond to instructional challenges.

Illuminate for both educators and philosophers that children learn about justice through adults' everyday enactments of (in)justice, regardless of whether that is their intent. In order to draw conclusions about what educators should teach students about justice, therefore, we need to know how educators can and do teach students about justice, including when they don’t even have justice on their minds. This means that philosophical and empirical inquiry must be brought into dialogue with one another.

Set a new agenda for philosophers of education so that deeply empirically-informed case-based research and writing becomes a norm in the field, as it has in bioethics, legal ethics, and recent contextualist work in non-ideal political theory;

Seed the field with new empirical cases about education that are sufficiently richly developed and documented that normative theorists are inspired to write about them for their own ends, independent of this project on justice in schools;

Contribute to two developments in contemporary political theory: the expansion of non-ideal theory as a self-sufficient enterprise (rather than as merely a negative of ideal theory), and the nascent growth of everyday theory to incorporate contextual, interpersonal, and micro-level considerations;